Re: Interesting masking/dot pattern problem

Right yeah I haven't explained it very well. The dots are static, and the animation is actually made of moving, flat colour, shape objects created in echospace.

When I said reveal that was misleading, I just meant the whole of the animation will be made of dots. So essentially I'm pixelating it, but instead of pixels, there are dots.

The animation is based on a still graphic, where each dot is kind of hand drawn and hand placed, so they all fit around eachother nicely. If you look at the image link, and imagine that the red circle is moving left. The top example would be very easy to do, the dots are a layer with whole in it (for the sake of the top example, it doesn't matter how this is done). The animation plays behind the dots, and that's it. But what I need to do is have the dots, simply switch to red (so at no point is one half full) as shown in the lower example in the image link. It's all got to look a bit like stop frame, so it doesn't matter that this would look jerky. Hope this makes sense!

Might end up faking it but I'm curious to know how this could be done as I've needed to do it a few times before. I think particular could be the answer, as if you use a layer grid emitter, it does actually create images from particles, but again, the trouble is I'm turning an existing design into motion, and the way the dots are laid out is kind of like a mosaic, where the gaps between large dots are filled by smaller dots for example, and I'm pretty sure there isn't a quick way to make particular do this. If I'm still not making sense, ignore me.